Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Final Prospect Eligibility Cutoffs

When we update our Rays Top Prospects Lists several players will no longer be eligible due to passing major league playing time thresholds. We use the same playing time cutoffs for prospect status as Baseball America:

4 comments:

The cutoffs make sense I guess, and it will be strange to not see the familiar names on the lists. But without the contributions of every one of those "no-longer-eligible" players the Rays' success of 2011 would have been less, and almost certainly not have resulted in the playoff appearance.

Oh sure, the goal of developing prospects is to help the big league team w/o incurring the cost of signing free agents. But it will seem weird not to have those guys on the lists. Hellickson and McGee have been on BA's since 2006!

It also opens up quite a few spots at the top of the list. From BAs preseason list 4 of the top 5 have graduated, plus the underrated Cobb. That will lead to more lower-level players and recent draftees on the lists. Which will lead to quite a bit of variance between different people's lists since the players have a shorter professional track record, if any at all. Which will lead to the wringing of hands and casting of stones! :)

He re-signed, Buente that is. It wasn't a big move so I just tweeted it. See upper right-hand part of each page for last 10 or so tweets, it's still up there. Not that he's going to make any prospect lists or anything, but I listed everyone who accrued MLB time this year to be complete. He's actually a useful reliever for for the Bulls for next year, and can make an emergency start.